


If You Are A Monster

by ABadPlanWellExecuted



Series: Certain Dark Things [6]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-02-15 18:35:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2239155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABadPlanWellExecuted/pseuds/ABadPlanWellExecuted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Rose has faced down some terrible things in her time, both with the Doctor and without, but nothing has frightened her like this man, this one single man, standing in a place he shouldn’t be.</i> A prequel to Conversations With The Devil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Trickster

**Author's Note:**

> This story won't contain rape, but there will be **non-consensual sexual contact (kissing, etc.)**.  
>  It will (eventually) contain some pretty heavy **violence**.  
>  This story will have **character death** in it.  
> I will add specific warnings to each chapter. If you have any questions, feel free to message me.  
> The title is from _A Monstrous Manifesto_ by Catherynne M. Valente.

It sounds sort of funny, but each new dimension has a different smell to it.  
  
It’s not the kind of thing that anyone would notice, of course–at least not without another dimension to compare. It’s like how home never smells like anything in particular until you come back from holiday. And it’s not just smell–there are different undertones in flavors, different textures of velvet, wood, steel. There is a different hum in the air–subtle but nonetheless ubiquitously present.  
  
It was an exciting discovery when Rose first noticed it. To think she’d been incredulous the first time the Doctor had claimed to be able to tell the date by scent alone–now she’s regularly using it to differentiate parallel universes. Not that she’s able to rely on it exactly, but it’s a nice backup in a pinch, and it’s always reassuring feeling now that she’s able to successfully travel to her own original dimension. The smell of home.   
  
But this time, it’s all wrong.  
  
Rose has landed in some sort of workshop, littered with tools and tables and metal framework. It looks a bit futuristic-steampunk, and she wishes she had the Doctor’s ability to tell the date.   
  
She wishes she had the Doctor.  
  
The floor underneath her feet is humming, and she thinks space station…no, spaceship. Definitely a spaceship this time, or…hmm. Well, some sort of ship, at least. The movement feels weird, though–not quite what she’d expect from a vessel with artificial gravity.  
  
She takes a deep breath, and there’s that weird smell again. It’s almost like home but not, like home with the faintly icky aftertaste of over-cooked food. She presses a hand to a metal strut, and there’s that strange sensation of everything being slightly too slick.   
  
Bloody hell. She’s in the stupid false parallel again. The damned causality bubble.  
  
Rose flatly refuses to call this a real universe. The mathematicians and physicists have argued about it with her, claiming it’s impossible for some sort of fake reality to exist, therefore it must be a real dimension. But Rose knows better.   
  
The first time she came here, she saw the Doctor’s dead body lying on a stretcher. And if that’s not the universe’s most brutal lie, then she doesn’t know what is.  
  
She gets out her equipment and does a quick scan to verify, per procedure. Her device beeps, and it’s confirmed–she’s in the false parallel. Complete waste of a jump. Still, she goes through her post-jump checklist, setting up the causality meter and readjusting the settings on her pain chip so that the filter setting is back to zero.   
  
She has to wait the thirty minutes for her equipment to recharge, so she decides to poke around a little, trying to figure out why the Dimension Cannon targeted this location.  
  
She turns a corner, and the answer is waiting for her.  
  
The TARDIS. It is standing at one end of the workshop, atop some sort of circular dais and surrounded by machinery.  
  
Finding it here makes sense, she supposes. The Dimension Cannon has been programmed to use as much information as possible to calculate her landing coordinates, in addition to the Doctor’s own timeline. The TARDIS is a perfectly good beacon, generally speaking, for finding the Doctor. And here in the false parallel, the Doctor is…  
  
The Doctor is…  
  
Gone, she thinks to herself and then sighs over her own cowardice.   
  
Still, she has no idea what the TARDIS is doing here, on this spaceship of all places. Has it been stolen by aliens? Or maybe she’s been bounced way into the future, and this is a human spacecraft. Anything’s possible, really–travelling by Dimension Cannon is by no means accurate.   
  
She approaches the ship. Her key fits into the lock, just as it always has, and the door swings inward. Inside, the lights are dim, like the ship is in its nighttime cycle or maybe on emergency power. It’s cold, far colder that she remembers, and her breath hangs in the air front of her like puffs of smoke.  
  
In the low light, Rose almost misses the tool bag, lying to the side of the console, and she just stops short of tripping over it. She squats down to take a look–it’s full of a strange assortment of wires and electrical connections and, sticking up on one side, a welder’s torch.   
  
Frowning, she tips it a little to get a better angle in the low light. She doesn’t recognize it, doesn’t remember the Doctor ever using it, but it could have been his. He never seemed to throw anything away.  
  
She pokes through the contents and then checks the underside of the console. A small panel has been removed, and there are signs of recent work. She sniffs, and there’s the faintly metallic scent of melted solder.   
  
“Hello.”  
  
The voice seems to come out of nowhere, and Rose jumps up, knocking over a welder’s mask that was lying on the edge of the console; as she spins around, it topples to the floor with a resounding crash.   
  
There is a man standing in the corridor doorway, the one that leads to the interior of the ship. He’s not particularly tall, but taller than her, with a lean face above a white shirt and tie. His sleeves are shoved up and messily rolled at the elbows, like he’s been working.  
  
He has dark, dark eyes.   
  
“Hi,” she says warily. “Uh. Who are you?”  
  
And all at once, there is an itch, just a little thing, at the back of her mind. It hums like the faint whine of a mosquito, and it makes her muscles tense along her neck and shoulders.  
  
The man doesn’t answer right away. He looks her over slowly from head to toe in a deliberate inspection, and a chill creeps up her spine.  
  
It’s an effort to keep from trembling, and it surprises her. Rose has faced down some terrible things in her time, both with the Doctor and without, things far worse than this one man, this one single man, standing in a place he shouldn’t be.   
  
“Hey,” she says, summoning her courage, her voice stronger, “I’m talking to you. Who are you and what’re you doing here?”   
  
His voice is low, monotone, and so quiet that she finds herself leaning forward just a bit to catch his words. “I’m nobody. Who are you?” A slight roll of his head, a crick of his neck. “Are you nobody, too?”  
  
She shakes her head a little, trying to clear her mind of that faint buzzing. “What?”  
  
It’s startling, the way his face suddenly transitions to smiling–pleasant, genial, but still strangely unsettling. “Sorry. I’m the Doctor, my dear. And who, might I ask, are you?”  
  
No.  
  
The hum in her head is louder now, an undercurrent of panic in her thoughts. She can see in her mind that horrible moment when she witnessed the Doctor’s body being hauled up by the UNIT response team. The exact shade of blue of his lips, the stillness under her hands when she pressed them to his chest–these are things burned into her memory. These are things she sees before she falls asleep every night.  
  
No, the Doctor isn’t here. The Doctor can’t be here. So who the hell is this in front of her?  
  
Heart hammering, she swallows and plays for time. “You’re the Doctor? How come I don’t recognize you?”  
  
He takes a step closer, just a little one, but all of her senses are on high alert, and the adrenaline pumps into her system. “I recently regenerated–a little Time Lord trick. I had a bit of a run-in under the Thames with an old enemy and was…seriously injured.”  
  
She shifts slightly, takes a step to the left and a little bit away from him under the guise of adjusting her weight. “Well then, how come you don’t recognize me?”  
  
“I seem to have a little post-regenerative amnesia. Not too surprising, really–I am prone to it, after all.” He tips his head, gives her a warm smile and takes another step. “So we’ve met before? Oh, and you have a key…you must be one of my companions. Forgive me having to ask, but what’s your name?”  
  
Her heart is pounding; her mind is racing. Could this be him? What if he had regenerated? What if UNIT had been wrong? She remembered just how disoriented he’d been after the last change–maybe he did get amnesia, but…  
  
Those eyes. Those terrible, dark eyes.  
  
Her palms are sweating, and the sound in her head is a high-pitched whine now, a frantic alarm bell. In a sudden burst of insight, Rose finally realizes what that sound is.  
  
It’s the TARDIS.  
  
And, oh God, that’s not the Doctor.


	2. A Fiend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s some threats of non-consensual mind-reading in this chapter and some (relatively) mild violence.

“Your name, dear,” he purrs, taking a step closer, and Rose automatically steps away in response. She edges around the curve of the console, moving closer to the doors without ever letting her eyes stray from his.  
  
“You know, maybe if you try to guess it, it’ll help you get your memory back,” she hedges, wondering exactly how long they’ll keep up this pretense. How long she has to think up a plan.  
  
And then she hears it. Just a soft sound, a little click from right near her feet. Rose and the man look down at the same time, both of them staring at the floor panel that has spontaneously unlocked itself and popped open.  
  
It’s one of the TARDIS storage cupboards.  
  
In a flash, Rose understands. It’s not meant as a hiding place for her–too small, and anyway, she’d just end up locked inside. She doesn’t have the charge to do a jump yet, and she can’t risk attempting one from inside the extradimensional space of the TARDIS anyway. There’s no one to come save her, and she almost certainly can’t avoid capture. But there is one thing she has to keep safe.  
  
She rips her shoulder pack off, and across the room, the man drops his façade. As he sprints toward her, Rose drops to her knees and thrusts the pack inside the cupboard. She slams it closed just as his hands hit the floor.  
  
“No no no!” he shouts, tugging at the grating. “What did you do?”  
  
Rose doesn’t bother to answer. She scrambles to her feet, ready to give running a try but he catches her by the hair as she tries to push past him.  
  
“Oh, no, I definitely want to have a talk with you,” he snarls, yanking her violently back toward the inside of the TARDIS, knocking her to the ground.  
  
Rose hits the floor and rolls. Palms pressed flat against the grating, she moves to get up again but then freezes when she sees him. The man is standing there, aiming something at her that looks quite a lot like a sonic screwdriver.  
  
His expression is smug. “I wouldn’t move, if I were you. Besides, there’s nowhere for you to go.”  
  
He points the screwdriver at the cupboard latch, trying to unlock it, but nothing happens. Muttering a soft curse, he flips through the settings. On the second try, the latch comes open with an audible snap.  
  
“There we are,” he says with a smirk as he toes open the cupboard door. But his face falls when it turns out to be full of an excess of neckwear–ties, bow ties, cravats, and scarves.  
  
“Oh for the love of Rassilon,” the man grumbles, stomping the cupboard closed again. “Stupid ship thinks it’s cute to tease me.” He presses his screwdriver against the console and activates it. The Time Rotor twitches, and the lights in the roundels begin to glow an unnatural orange. The hum of the ship becomes a shriek.  
  
“Stop it,” Rose cries. “You’re hurting her!”  
  
At the sound of her voice, the man stops. He smiles. “Yes, I am,” he agrees pleasantly. “Quite a lot, actually. But you raise a good point.” He nods slowly like he’s mulling it over. “The ship will take weeks to break. Why bother with it when I’ve got you?”  
  
Springing up, Rose hits the ground running, not heading for the exit but for the corridor that generally leads to the interior of the ship. She doesn’t know who this man is or what he’s doing here, but she knows the TARDIS. There are a million places to hide.  
  
She flies across the grating, sprinting around the corner as fast as she can. There’s only the faint sounds of footsteps behind her–her pursuer doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry–but Rose will take any advantage available. She races past the doors lining the corridor because just up ahead there’s a junction that should lead to a veritable maze of hallways. If she can just reach it, she’ll be able to–  
  
Around the corner, there’s nothing but a wall.  
  
Spinning around, she sees that the opposite corridor is also closed off. The sound of footsteps is louder now. Frantically, she retraces her steps, tugging at doors that refuse to open. She tries storage rooms and broom cupboards and that one room with all the sock monkeys, but everything is locked up tight.  
  
“C’mon,” she begs, tugging uselessly at handles and knobs. “Open, open, open.”  
  
At the end of the hallway, the man walks around the corner at a nice leisurely pace. “Oh, what a shame, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” he calls, full of mock-sympathy. “There’s nowhere to go.”  
  
“What did you do to her?” Rose demands, wishing she’d had her stun weapon on her person instead of in her pack. What she wouldn’t give to let this bloke have a good jolt.  
  
“Me?” He snorts. “Not a thing. The ship burned out its own chronographical control vertices. And I could repair them but not without access to the central command core, which I don’t have”–he raises his voice–“on account of this ship being such a bloody cow.”  
  
“I don’t believe you,” she says, shaking her head. “The TARDIS would open up for me. You must have done something to damage her.”  
  
“Now why on Earth would I do that?” He tilts his head, bemused. “And really, I mean that literally–why on  _Earth_? Do you think this planet is where I would be if I had any choice at all? Believe me, that’s  _his_  kink, not mine. No,” he continued, eyeing one of the doors with annoyance, “unfortunately for both of us, the ship has sealed itself shut.”  
  
Rose licks her lips, trying to play for time. “Yeah, well, even if it wasn’t closed up, you still wouldn’t be able to pilot the TARDIS. There’s loads of protocols in place to prevent that sort of thing. Isometric controls.”  
  
“Isomorphic,” he corrects lazily, the smirk on his face making it clear that he wouldn’t consider that much of a challenge, and Rose suppresses a shiver.  
  
There’s just something about him–she can’t quite put her finger on it. She’s never seen his face before, she’s certain, but…but there’s something there. He’s a bit of alright, wears the air of superiority well, all rough edges and five o’clock shadow. Hair mussed just a bit like he’d been raking his fingers through it. All things that might have had her looking twice under normal circumstances, but none of that explains the unnerving feeling of recognition. No, it must just be the arrogance that’s familiar, that cocky, oh-I’m-good look on his face that’s reminding her of…of…  
  
Rose backs up until she hits the wall. “Who are you?”  
  
He looks her over quizzically, her question an apparent source of fascination. “I’m Harold Saxon,” he says as he moves closer, in a voice that implies that she ought to recognize the name. When she doesn’t react, he frowns, and his consideration gets even sharper.  
  
“Harold Saxon?” Rose licks her lips. “So you’re just, what, some bloke? Who just happens to be onboard the Doctor’s TARDIS. Doing work on it with what looks like a…” she eyes his weapon thoughtfully, “sonic screwdriver?” She rolls her eyes with as much bravado as she can manage. “OK, sure.”  
  
He looks peeved as he waves the device at her. “It’s a  _laser_  screwdriver. Nobody uses sonic anymore.” Another swift step, and he is in front of her, jabbing it into her stomach. “Now,” he murmurs, leaning in close, “if you recall, I asked you a question. Who are you?”  
  
And there it is again, that feeling of familiarity. Something in the way he blinks or the taste of his breath…something that’s there but not there. But familiar or no, Rose gave up telling people her name quite awhile ago. She’s not about to make an exception for this man.  
  
“Your name,” he orders when she is silent.  
  
“Emily Dickenson,” she answers, straight-faced, and then winces when he jams the screwdriver against her ribs.  
  
“I could cut you in half with this,” he hisses. “Do you still think it’s a good idea to play games with me?”  
  
“Just don’t see why I should tell you,” she pants, adrenalin pumping. “You’ll kill me either way. Who the hell are you, anyway? ‘Cause I don’t believe for a minute that you’re just some everyday, run-of-the-mill human.”  
  
The anger in his face dissolves, gives way to a calculated sort of pleasure. “You really want to know?” he says, reaching down with his free hand to grab her arm at the wrist. With a yank, he pulls her hand away from the wall and brings it to his chest. “Feel,” he instructs.  
  
At first, Rose has no idea what he’s talking about. All she can feel is the soft material of his shirt, the thin padding of a vest underneath, and she’s thinking about whether this is enough of a distraction to risk trying to disarm him with her free hand. But then…oh. Oh, then she feels it. A rhythm so very familiar, absolutely unforgettable, a pulse that she’s only felt from one other person–the heartsbeat of a Time Lord.  
  
As the realization spreads across her face, he grins darkly, his eyes dancing. “Surprise!”  
  
“Who are you?” she demands, horrified. The delight on his face is frightening; it has an ugliness behind it that twists her stomach, makes her skin crawl.  
  
“You,” he says smoothly, smugly, “can call me the Master.” His eyes dip down, just for a moment, to her mouth.  
  
In shock, the words tumble out of her. “But you’re a Time Lord! How can you be here? You’re supposed to be dead!”  
  
At that last word, his smile drops away. He tears her hand away from his chest and slams it against the wall, leaning into it. “What do you know about that?” he snarls.  
  
Rose shuts her mouth defiantly and looks away.  
  
“You’ll tell me what I want to know,” he says slowly, his face so close to hers that his breath makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “One way or another.” With the screwdriver still pressing into her abdomen, he lets go of her arm and brings his hand to her face, right to her temple.  
  
As she realizes what he is going to do, Rose hastily tosses up every wall she can to shield her mind, even though she knows it’s completely futile. Torchwood’s basic psychic training was not meant to keep out Time Lords.  
  
His fingers press into her temples, and suddenly she can feel him there at the edges of her mind, inspecting her defenses. It’s nothing like what she’s experienced in training, the gentle hum of another consciousness. No, his mind is a lightning bolt, suspended in time, just waiting to be unleashed. She bites back a whimper because oh this is going to hurt, and she can see he knows it, too, wants it, even, she can tell by the way his fingertips have started stroking her skin and the dark anticipation in his eyes. He rears back, about to force his way in, and–  
  
 _NO._  
  
For an instant, bright, golden light seems to erupt from behind her eyelids, a firework exploding in her brain. The force of it snaps her head back, smashing it into the wall behind her, and stars dance in her vision. She slides limply to the floor, and for one dazed moment, she thinks that he must have hit her. Anticipating another strike, she tries to lift her arms to ward off the next blow. But as her vision clears, she sees the man, the Master, lying on the ground in front of her.  
  
He moans and wipes a hand over his face, smearing the blood that’s oozing from his nose. “What the hell was that?” He struggles to sit up and fails, boggling at her the whole time like she’s something impossible, incredible, horrific. “What the hell are you?”  
  
Licking her lips, Rose tastes blood as well. She has no idea what just happened, but she’s not going to hang around and hope it works a second time. Bolting to her feet, she races past him and makes for the console room.  
  
Once she reaches it, she spends a few moments tugging at the grating without success–the TARDIS won’t return her pack. With the Master’s footsteps now echoing from the corridor, she abandons it and runs out of the ship, her only hope to avoid capture.  
  
Unfortunately, as Rose soon discovers, they are onboard an airship, midflight, and there just aren’t that many places to hide. Within a minute, there is a security alert blaring through the airship’s comm system, and soon the corridors are swarming with guards.  
  
She lasts eleven minutes, fifty-two seconds before she’s caught.


	3. A Mummer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot of torture in this chapter, but no gore.

The prisoner quarters of the Valiant are surprisingly nice.

This, Rose learns, is because these particular cells weren’t built with prisoners in mind. The ship has a proper jail, of course, but when it filled up, they converted some of the guest quarters with reinforced walls, clear plexiglass doors, and bars installed over the porthole windows. Otherwise, the amenities were left mostly intact. Rose is pretty sure the duvet on the bed is real goose down, and there’s little complimentary shampoo bottles in the bath. It’s probably the most comfortable cell she’s ever been in.

There’s even a mini washing machine and dryer tucked into a nook right outside the loo. When she was first brought in, Rose sat on the edge of the plush mattress and stared at them, trying to picture what the Doctor would do in this situation. She imagined keeping a lookout for the guards while he knelt down, pried the covers off. Him getting a streak of grease on the cuff of his shirt as he improvised some sort of short-range teleport or a psychokinetic gravitation beam or maybe a series of small, tasteful explosives, no doubt culminating in an elaborate and utterly brilliant escape plan.

On the second day, Rose uses them to do her laundry.

It smarts a bit, not being able to pull the rabbit out of the hat with a flourish and a bow like he always could. And even if she were able to come up with that sort of plan, scraped together from the things she'd picked up traveling with the Doctor and her new-found knowledge of inter-dimensional travel, what'd be the point to trying it against the Master? She might be able to fool a Slitheen, pull a fast one on a Sycorax, but there's no use trying to out-Time Lord a Time Lord.

Lying on her back amid the soft linens and cushy pillows with nothing else to do, she thinks of everything the Doctor taught her, turns all those carefully elucidated lessons over in her head.

It'll be alright. The science had never really been the point anyway.

***

When she was still young and the Doctor had worn leather, the two of them had stopped off for a bit of sightseeing in the Trebular cluster. It had been a nice day up until they'd realized that a nearby human colony was about to be invaded by a particularly ruthless alien species.

Unfortunately, the Consul in charge of the colony refused to see them immediately, citing his busy schedule and their lack of appointment. Rose could remember getting madder and madder as they were forced to cool their heels in the palatial version of a waiting room.

> “This is ridiculous,” she snapped, pacing back and forth along the length of the plush rug. “What could the Consul possibly be working on that’s more important than some bloody big alien invasion?”
> 
> The Doctor seemed uncharacteristically serene.“Relax. This is just one of those things that people with power do to make themselves feel important. The more important they need to feel, the longer they’ll keep you waiting.”
> 
> Rose snorted, eyeing the entrance to the Consul's office chambers. “We ought to just bust down the door.”
> 
> “Nah. Tell you what, though–let’s have a little talk with the secretary once he gets back to his desk.”
> 
> “What good will that do?” Rose kicked the side of one of the chairs in frustration. “S’not like he’ll let us in without permission. Might as well just use the sonic on the lock.”
> 
> The Doctor shook his head. “We don’t need him to let us in. Look,” he added, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “When somebody needs to prove how important they are, don’t go at ‘em head first–that’ll just get them riled up. Better to work around them, show them, and everyone else, just how dispensable they really are.”
> 
> His eyes twinkled. “The secretary might not be able to get us into the perimeter defense controls, but I bet he knows who’s who in the perimeter defense committee. Probably knows a thing or two about how it’s run, too. The secretaries, the assistants, the juniors, the ones who keep things running–they’re the ones with all the knowledge, Rose. We get in good with them, we’ll have that plan ready to put in place before his royal importance bothers to get off the phone. C’mon.”
> 
> And to her surprise, it had worked. They spent the rest of the afternoon sweet-talking the secretary–the lovely Mr. Rafferty–and the assistant junior clerk to the defense committee–one Camilla Troilada–into getting access to the necessary plans. They made phone calls, sent memos, and worked their way up the chain of command. And when the Consul finally deigned to send for them, they went into his office with two Joint-Chiefs, one Senator, three heads of the military, and a fully developed plan, needing nothing more than a signature.
> 
> After it was all over, and the crisis had been averted, the Doctor had been particularly cheerful as a result of the lack of bloodshed.
> 
> “You see?” he said with a grin. “All sorted.”
> 
> “I can’t believe he just signed it like that,” said Rose, amazed. “And that speech he gave–you’d think the whole thing was his idea!”
> 
> The Doctor shrugged. “He had no choice but to sign it. Well, he could have refused, but not without compromising the illusion that he was the one in charge. Too many of the others would have objected.”
> 
> “I still don’t get why he kept us waiting in the first place,” said Rose. “If he’d just listened to us, he wouldn’t have needed to save face at all.”
> 
> “Well, remember this. It’s a good rule of thumb–you'll always know just how much people in power need their ego stroked by how long they keep you waiting,” the Doctor said knowledgeably. “Shows you how much they need to feel in control.”

***

The Master waits three days to see her.

Rose spends the time chatting with the guards posted outside her cell, at least as much as she can through the plexiglass door. She gets the bulk of her information from a guard named Jeremy Acres, a nice man with a wife and two kids at home. At first, he is hesitant to talk to her, but if there’s one thing Rose is good at, it’s getting people to open up. By lunchtime, he’s telling her about the inestimable Harold Saxon and his rise to power.

Rose listens to all of it, nods at the right places, keeping eyes on him all the time. Jeremy is extremely reluctant to say anything genuinely negative about the Master, but by the end of the second day, she’s brought him around enough to get him to admit that he’s terrified.

He comes off as completely sincere, and she’s definitely watching for any sign that he’s not. A potential ally, then, hopefully. If she can convince him, find other dissidents, maybe they’ll be able to get a revolution going. Put a stop to this renegade Time Lord.

It’s what the Doctor would have done.

Seventy-eight hours after her arrival, four guards arrive at her cell, all of them armed, and one of them holds up a pair of handcuffs. As he restrains her, Rose works to look past the gun barrels trained on her and into the faces of the people wielding them, but the guards' eyes are hard, their expressions blank. She tries to say something, some joke to cut the tension, but there's no reaction, and with a push to her shoulder, they begin escorting her to the bridge.

The ship must be huge, with all the twists and turns they take, and there are more guards at virtually every intersection along the way. The two standing at the door to the bridge snap to attention as she's brought past.

Inside, the bridge of the Valiant is large and all done out in dark green paint with silver chrome accents. The first thing Rose thinks of when they shove her through the doors is those new comic books Mickey’s been obsessed with recently and how the super villains always have lairs just like this, complete with minions keeping watch at every exit.

At one end of the room, there is a set of metal stairs leading up to the helm, shiny with futuristic tech. The Master is waiting at the top, watching her.

Doctor Doom, Rose thinks, and her stomach muscles quiver with silent, hysterical laughter.

The guards pull her to a halt at the foot of the stairs.

For a moment, nobody says anything, and over the hushed sound of the ship’s machinery, Rose can just hear the Master tapping his finger against the railing.  _One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four_.

Abruptly, the rhythm stops, and he tucks his hands into his pockets. “Ah yes, here's our surprise guest.” He descends the stairs slowly, eyes on her the whole way. “What to do with you, hmm?”

When he comes to a stop in front of her, he breaks into a grin, quick and broad. “It’s been a long time since I killed someone in person.”

Rose tamps down on the jolt of fear that threatens to overwhelm and schools her features into something approximating calm. "Guess I should be honored then,” she says, lifting her chin. “That I’m such a threat you've got to do it yourself."

He raises an eyebrow as his smile dies. "Don't flatter yourself; you're completely harmless. This is just for the sake of nostalgia."

“Right,” she snorts, glancing around the room. “You’ve got a lot of security for me being so harmless.”

“You are harmless,” he insists. “A ridiculous, useless human, just like all the rest. Hardly out of the primordial soup. There’s just one thing that makes you the slightest bit different–the Doctor. Who knows what sort of things he told you, the idiot. This,” he waved a hand at the guards, “is just a concession to his rampant stupidity. For all I know, he gave you a manual on how to kill Time Lords.”

“Uh, you did say you knew him, right?” she says, wrinkling her nose, “‘Cause that’s not really his style.”

“No?” His face is impassive, impossible to read. “So was it all peace and love and group sings? Stand in a circle holding hands? Were there master classes in hugging?”

“Yeah, ‘course,” she answers, just as straight-faced. “In between the trips to Fuzzy Baby Bunny World and the Land of Jelly Babies and Rainbows.”

One corner of his mouth turns up, and his gaze shifts to something slightly less predatory. "I suppose he was the one who taught you how to break into places without getting caught, then?"

“Well, yeah."

“Didn’t do you much good,” the Master observes.

“Sure, but when that goes horribly wrong, there was also how to fast-talk your way out of an arrest,” Rose continues. “How to pick the lock on your cell door when they arrest you anyway. How to emulate local customs quickly so you don’t offend the magistrate who’s presiding over your case, and, when the magistrate's sick of hearing your gob and finds you guilty, how to grab the sonic screwdriver off the evidence table and leg it back to the TARDIS. So, y’know, just the standard stuff, really.”

He actually looks mildly amused, and Rose takes a small breath of relief. Keep him talking, that's the ticket.

"But," he says, rocking back on his heels, "for all that, you weren't with him when he died."

She swallows down the memory– _he's not really dead, he's not really dead_ –and shakes her head.

"He'd already left you behind, then." His eyes search her face, and then he gives her a look full of mock-pity. "So were you just not very good, then? What a shame. You know, he usually waits till you lot get older before trading in his assistants."

"Sorry," asks Rose with a snort, "is this the part where I'm supposed to get jealous? It's just, that one was just sort of obvious, y'know?"

He smiles pleasantly as he reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out his laser screwdriver. "Maybe you'd rather it be the part where I fry your internal organs?" Leaning in closer, he murmurs conspiratorially, "Or should we go for something more hack-and-slash, see how high we can get the blood spatters on the walls? The maids do like a challenge."

There's a click, and the screwdriver in his hand starts to hum like it's charging up.

Fear twists in her stomach at the rapid mood shift. OK. OK. If he just wants her dead, he could’ve had her executed in her cell days ago. And yeah, maybe he’s just that crazy and wants to do it himself, but maybe not. His face is hard to read, eyes so dark as travel down the length of her, but there’s something there.

Interest, she thinks. Curiosity. Okay, she can work with that.

“Sure, right, kill me. But first,” she says, trailing off until he looks back at her face, and when she continues, she lets just a hint of admiration color her tone. “I’ve got to know–how in the world did you survive the Time War?”

For an instant, something flickers over his face, so fast she can hardly catch it before his mask slips back into place, but it’s enough to tell her she’s on the right track. She exhales, shakes her head a little. “It’s just…he was so sure nobody survived. Said he could tell. And given how the war ended–” (and there it is again, stronger this time) “–well, I’ve got to admit, I’m sort of curious myself.”

Her gambit doesn't get quite the reaction she expected. Lightning fast, his hand flies toward her head, and Rose shies back on instinct, only to be grabbed on either side by the guards. The Master stops just before touching her, his palm centimeters from her cheekbone. A look of frustration crosses his face.

“Still there,” he mutters, curling his fingers into a fist. “Stupid bloody ship.”

Rose is craning her neck to get as far away from his touch as possible, grimacing in anticipation of another attempt at telepathy, but as he speaks, she relaxes a little.

“It was the TARDIS, then?” she asks hesitantly. “The gold light and bloody noses and all that?”

“Yes.” His reply is clipped. “It’s using a preexisting connection to shield your mind from me. Quite the trick, though it must be costing quite a bit of energy to do it. I hadn’t realized it had so much left in reserve.”

He drops his hand, eyes narrowing on her thoughtfully.

“Nice of her,” Rose comments.

Adjusting the settings on the screwdriver, he replies, “Not really.”

He points it at her, and before she can even process the sound of it activating, she's doubling over in pain. It’s bad enough to force a shout from her throat, make her curl up at the abdomen, and then, as quickly as it started, it’s gone, leaving her panting in relief.

“Perfect torture device,” says the Master, sounding pleased as he twirls the screwdriver in his hand. “Customizable levels of pain and no lasting damage. It’s generalized at the moment, but I’m considering adding a few extra settings for variety–sharp, dull, hot, and cold, at the least. What do you think?”

“Yeah, nice work, very impressive,” says Rose sourly. Her eyes dart around the room, instinctually looking for an ally, but there’s been hardly any reaction to the torture from any of the guards or other personnel. The soft, polite murmur of people at work, uninterrupted by her cries, is almost more chilling than the look of enjoyment on the Master’s face.

The only person actually facing toward her is a woman standing on the upper level with her back against the wall. She doesn't seem to be doing any work; in fact, she looks like she's trying her best to become invisible, but her eyes keep flickering down toward the Master and Rose. When the Master turns, following Rose's gaze up to where she stands, the woman freezes.

"Lucy." The Master snaps his fingers and gives a choppy 'come-here' motion with one hand, and the woman is practically halfway down the stairs before he's through. She comes to stand at his side, just slightly behind him.

The Master's brow furrows as he watches her. "No red today?"

Lucy shifts her weight uncomfortably and tugs at the side of her beige pleated skirt. "Still ripped. They said they'd have it finished by tonight, though."

"Hmm. Tonight." He catches hold of her hand, presses a rough kiss against her palm. "I think we've had enough of the politician's wife look, don't you?"

"Of course, Harry."

"Wife?" Rose can't quite help asking.

Lucy's attention turns back to her, eyes oddly vacant. "Harry, who is she?"

"Just a dissident." He slips the screwdriver into Lucy's hand and wraps his hand around hers. "Want to give it a try?"

Rose doesn't get a chance to get a read on Lucy's response; the pain comes too quickly. The Master is talking, but she can't register what he's saying over the waves coursing through her nervous system and her own shrieks.

With a click, it's over again, and Rose bends at the waist, panting as she recovers.

"–possibly be the key," the Master is saying softly in Lucy's ear. "If it works, I'll be able to regain control of the central command core. And then we'll see about taking a trip in my TARDIS."

Lucy hums a response, sounding pleased.

"S'not yours," says Rose through gritted teeth. "It's the Doctor's."

"He's dead," says the Master coolly. "Who else is going to use it? The Time Lords are gone, Gallifrey's missing, there aren't even any Daleks around to lay claim to the salvage. And now," he said, hunkering down, "I've got you, too. One of the Doctor's companions." He strokes the back of his knuckles over her cheek. "Looks like I'm inheriting all his old stuff."

"Fuck you."

Oh, he loves that, eyes bright as he snarls and jams the screwdriver directly against her abdomen. Excruciating, torturous, blinding, a buzzing in her ears, talking, someone is talking, someone is wailing, screaming, but she doesn't know, can't tell, there’s nothing there, nothing but pain.

...

Rose opens her eyes to find herself on the floor, gasping. Endorphins flood her system in the aftermath, turning the residual ache into euphoria. Shuddering, she wipes her mouth on her shoulder to get the spittle off her face. The handcuffs bite at her wrists as she struggles to get back to her feet.

She can't quite make it, but the guards haul her up the rest of the way. The Master is standing in front of her, one corner of his mouth turned up. Lucy is nowhere to be seen.

"That was fun," he comments, giving the screwdriver a twirl. "Shall we go again?"

“No!” Her response is immediate, out of her mouth before she has a chance to think.

The Master raises an eyebrow. “So what have you got for me that’s more entertaining?”

Rose licks her lips, trying to center her thoughts enough to turn up the setting on her PAIN chip. Not too much, of course–she still needs to be able to flinch and cry at the right moments, enough to be convincing, because the last thing she wants is to tip him off that she has a way around his torture device–but without it, she won't be able to endure this level of pain much longer.

Trying to buy time, she asks, “What d’you want to know?”

Those dark eyes are leveled right at her. “Everything. How you met the Doctor. Where you traveled with him. Every place you went and everything you did. Every battle you fought. But let’s start with your name.”

She’s not sure what difference it’d make if he knew who she was, but the TARDIS is going through a lot of trouble to help her keep her secrets. Taking a deep breath, Rose manages to adjust her chip levels before shaking her head.

The pain is still hideous, but it's nothing compared to last time. Still, it’s tempting, so tempting to turn her chip all the way up, to block it all out. She hits the floor again, dully recalling her training. Her hand-to-hand instructor, who never approved of the chip to begin with, frowning as he lecturing her.  _"Never engage hand-to-hand with PAIN CHIP fully activated. You are stronger than you know; pain is the signal that prevents you from hurting yourself along with your opponent.”_

She won't turn it up any more. The setting is enough to keep her from losing sense of her surroundings, and when it stops, she thinks she could manage to regain her feet. Still, she stays on the ground and lets the guards lift her.

"Alright," says the Master calmly, "next question. Where did you first meet the Doctor?"

The interrogation goes on and on. He reduces the severity of the torture at times to allow her to recover faster, but still, Rose begins to feel the physical toll it's taking on her body, muscles shaking as she sweats out fluids and electrolytes. She does her best to hide the weakness, but sooner or later, she's going to break and give him what he wants.

Whatever the hell that might be.

She honestly has no idea at this point what he’s hoping to hear, and she's too exhausted to figure it out. He wants to know her name, of course, that makes sense, but the rest of it is just a jumble.

_"Were you in a battle? Is that where he met you? Did he save your life? Did you help him fight?"_  There are lists of planets as well-- _Karn, Vystrol, Kolox, Polymos, Cirion, Nestene, Arcadia, Skaro_ \--only a few of which she dimly recognizes and none that she's actually visited. He goes over them again and again, switching up the way that he asks the questions, picking at associated details, circling back around again. It's no good, though. No matter how many times he asks, she can't tell him a thing about them, couldn’t even if she wanted to.

There’s a pause. She is lying on the floor trying not to weep. The guards have given up picking her up for the moment, and the cool tiles are soothing her flushed face. Someone brings a glass of water to the Master; eyes closed, Rose can hear him swallowing.

She'd kill for some water.

Almost on cue, the Master kneels down and gives her shoulder a little shake. "Here, have something to drink. You must be thirsty."

She tries to weigh the potential psychological impact of his tactic against the physiological drain from thirst, but she's too tired to think it through properly and ends up just going with pride. "No."

For a long moment, he stares down at her. "Military training," he surmises.

Exhaustion is the only thing keeping her from rolling her eyes. He's not technically incorrect, of course, but the way he’s been phrasing his questions, it's like he thinks she was some sort of wartime spaceship commander.

He gestures to the guards to lift her back up. "Did it change you? Is that why he left you?" He smirks as she regains her feet. "He could never stomach someone with the guts to get things done. Was that it? Did you become too hard to live up to the Doctor’s precious ideals?"

"You're wasting your time; I’m not telling you a thing. Interrogation-proof." Something flickers in the back of her mind at those words, some memory, but it’s too brief for her to catch it.

"That so? Well," he says, adjusting the screwdriver, "maybe it's time to turn up the settings a bit."

This time, when he thrusts the point of it against her stomach, there is one brief, blinding moment of pain, utterly overwhelming the chip at the base of her skull, and then everything goes dark.

***

> "So, how'd you do it, anyway?" Rose asked as she popped open the lid of the take-out box.
> 
> They were sitting together on the jumpseat, a bag of take-out between them. The Doctor was down to just his shirtsleeves, having shed his coat and pinstriped jacket, and he’d tossed his tie back over one shoulder. It kept threatening to slip back down into place as he dug around in the sack for a pair of plastic forks.
> 
> "Do what?" he asked as he produced one and handed it to her.
> 
> Rose took it and shifted her position so that one leg was drawn up on the seat. She rested the container on her knee and started poking through it with her fork. "You know, earlier today. With the Lord What's-His-Name. The Duke of Pompousness." She took a bite.
> 
> "Ah, yes," he said, pulling out the other fork. "The Grand High Chancellor of Officious Temerity."
> 
> Rose stopped chewing, her mouth still full. "Was that his real title?"
> 
> The Doctor laughed as he opened his own container. "No."  
>   
> She swallowed. "Well, anyway, I wanted to know how you figured it out. How you knew he was hiding the captives in the armory."
> 
> "Oh, that." He twisted his fork in his noodles. "It's easy. He told me."
> 
> "No, he didn't," Rose protested. "I was there, remember? He never talked about the captives at all."
> 
> "Well," he said around bites, "there's talking and then there's talking."
> 
> "Yeah, that clears everything up, thanks."
> 
> "I'm serious! There's a lot of ways to say something. Not all of them are obvious or even out loud."
> 
> Rose paused, the fork halfway to her mouth. "So you, what, read his mind?"
> 
> The Doctor shook his head. "Nah, didn't need to. Didn't have the chance. Wouldn't even if I did." When she still looked wary, he added, "Well, it'd be rude, wouldn't it?"
> 
> Rose ate the food off her fork, chewing thoughtfully. Once she swallowed, she asked, "So how, then?"
> 
> "You remember I brought up the topic repeatedly. Talked about getting to the bottom of this, making the perpetrator pay, all that sort of thing."
> 
> Rose nodded.
> 
> "Well, I think it threw him off. He hadn't expected us to know anything was wrong at all and was worrying about whether anything would implicate him and how much we knew and if all his tracks had been sufficiently covered. Which, of course, as we know, they hadn't been."
> 
> He grabbed his drink out of the cardboard carrier and took a long pull from the straw. "Thing is, it takes a lot of effort to keep a secret a secret. If somebody's nervous or distracted enough, they'll always let something slip, either because they'll say something that's too close to the truth, or they'll betray it with their body language."
> 
> "And which one did His High-And-Mightiness do?"
> 
> The Doctor chuckled. "Both. You remember we were talking about possible egresses for the traitors?"
> 
> "Yeah. Um," she looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. "You kept going on about how you couldn't figure out how they'd gotten in and out again, should've been impossible. All of that."
> 
> "Right. So he kept saying that he didn't know how, couldn't imagine a way, everything's sealed up, and so forth. Then he said, 'And there's that access bay next to the armory, but that's closed for repairs and locked tight. No one could pass through there.'"
> 
> Rose's jaw dropped. "You mean he told you the way they'd actually gotten the people in there?"
> 
> "Nah, of course not. They'd brought them in the cargo carrier, almost certainly. That's not the point. The important bit is that he mentioned the armory specifically."
> 
> "Why's that?"
> 
> "Well, why mention it at all? Why not just say the access bay is locked? We didn't need to know where in relation to the armory it was located, or where it was located at all for that matter. That extra bit of specificity was enough to get me thinking."
> 
> Rose took a sip from her drink and wedged it back into the carrier so it wouldn't tip. "And the body language?"
> 
> The Doctor nodded. "That was the confirmation. When I went to try to pull up the schematics of the palace on the big screen, he kept trying to angle himself in front of the armory. Bit silly looking, actually."
> 
> "But why'd he do that?
> 
> "He couldn't help it. Subconscious reaction."
> 
> Rose pursed her lips, eyeing him. "Does that really work, or are you just having me on?"
> 
> "Absolutely it works. The things you're hiding, the things you mustn't say take effort to keep in. Think of it this way: how much do you  _not_  want to say, ohhh," he scrunched up his face, thinking, "purple rhinoceros?"
> 
> Rose opened her mouth, but he stopped her with a wave of his fork. "Don't actually say it. Just, how much do you want to avoid saying it?"
> 
> She shrugged. "I dunno. I don't really care one way or another."
> 
> "Exactly. And how much effort is it to not say it?"
> 
> "Um..." She thought about it. "None?"
> 
> "Right. Now, Rose Tyler..." He leaned in closer, a little smile on his lips as his eyes probed her face. "Think about your deepest, darkest secret. That one thing that you don't ever want to let slip, something really embarrassing. The thing that comes back to haunt you right before you go to sleep. The thing that makes you squirm in your bed at night."
> 
> She could feel her cheeks flushing, her whole face lighting up like a candle because the first thing that came to mind didn't have anything to do with the tumble she took on the balance beam as a kid or the time she'd crashed Mickey's car into a post box. Especially with the words  _squirm in your bed at night_ –ugg, did he even have a clue? Honestly, that was just unnecessary.
> 
> His little smile grew into a grin as he watched her shift uncomfortably. "There it is. Right in the front of your mind, on the tip of your tongue, and you're so close to saying it, too, am I right?"
> 
> She closed her mouth tight and shook her head.
> 
> "Oh, c'mon, Rose, tell me. A little hint? I mean, if you're the evil alien dictator, you can't just clam up. You've got to talk, or the other side will know you're trying to hide something." He tipped his head to the side, staring at her with that same piercing focus she'd seen him use a thousand times before on his opponents. "So what is it you're thinking of?"
> 
> She licked the corner of her lips unconsciously and took a breath. "Oh, nothing really. Just, um, wondering where we'll go next." At his raised eyebrow, she huffed, tossed her hair a little. "And whether I should get a new pair of shoes. And how many rooms there are on the TARDIS. And how–" Her mouth snapped shut just in time, and she pressed her lips together to make sure _"–many freckles you have"_  didn't get a chance to escape.
> 
> There was a long pause, during which the Doctor's smile turned just a bit smug, and Rose's face heated up all over again at the thought that he could tell what she'd been about to say. Then he eased back a little, chuckling.
> 
> "Nice save," he said appreciatively. "But you see what I mean, yes? You didn't want to reveal your secret, but it was an effort not to. Enough distraction, and you'd let it slip, either through words or body language. It's a good trick to remember. The truth will out."
> 
> He resumed poking around the Styrofoam container with his fork as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
> 
> Rose fumed silently for a moment. "Oh, alright, and what about you, Doctor? What's your deepest, darkest secret?"
> 
> He speared a piece of soggy vegetable and held it up for a better look. "Nah, won't work on me. The trick," he continued, frowning a little as he scraped the bite off his fork on the edge of the carton, "is to have so many deepest, darkest secrets that there's not really one in particular that stands out." Another go with his fork brought up a noodle; he stuffed it into his mouth and closed his eyes, chewing contemplatively.
> 
> His face was utterly calm, betraying no blush or nervous tic, but Rose wasn't willing to give up that easily. "Oh, c'mon, none of that," she said, giving a little prod to his knee. "There's got to be something that you don't want to say, yeah?"
> 
> The Doctor swallowed and then turned to fish a napkin out of the take-out bag. Carefully wiping his fingers, he shook his head. "Nope. Sorry to disappoint, Rose, but I'm interrogation-proof." He tossed the used napkin into the bag and leaned back on the seat, gazing up at the Time Rotor, the very picture of ease.
> 
> "You just don't want to say," she scoffed. "What about how you can't clam up and all that? You've got to say something."
> 
> "Well," he said, resting his feet on the console, "if you like, I could talk on any number of subjects. Want to know about the biology of the Raxacoricofallapatorians? The time I met Khutulun? I tell you, that girl had a lot of horses. Or maybe you'd like to hear the history of the spatula, eh? Gotta love a good spatula story."
> 
> "Thanks but no," said Rose flatly, and the Doctor laughed.
> 
> Hopping up, he started whirling about, turning dials, flipping levers, checking figures on the viewscreen. "So what do you think? How about we give 2326 a try, go for a ride on the Space Elevator? Sound good?" He paused and frowned absently at the screen, giving it a tap on the side until the static cleared from the display. "Want to go now? Or no, I suppose you'll want to go to bed first."
> 
> What she wanted was to keep pushing, but it was clear he was going to chatter on about something completely irrelevant. Rose let out a frustrated sigh and, giving up on any attempt at prying a secret out of him, said goodnight before stomping off to her room. And it was only later, as she lay in bed after her shower, that she realized something.
> 
> During that whole talk about spatulas and space elevators, not once, not one single time, had he looked at her.

***

There’s pressure at one side of her neck.

She opens her eyes, and a man's face swims into focus. One of the guards, leaning over to check her pulse. "She's awake, sir."

A chair squeaks against the floor. "Finally." A television set is turned off with a click. "Well? Pick her up off the floor!"

"Yes, sir."

The guards lift her up once again, and Rose blinks, trying to remember what's been happening. The Master. Questions, he'd asked lots of questions. All about her and the Doctor and how they'd met. And about planets and war and battle and fighting, the Doctor fighting, and how Gallifrey is missing, and–

_Gallifrey is missing_. That's what he'd said. Not destroyed, not moved, not time locked– _missing_.

“Oh,” she murmurs, “I understand now.” She looks right at him, her face breaking into a smile for the first time in hours. “You don’t know how it ended.”


	4. A Villain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings this chapter.

"You don't," she says, head spinning dizzily.  "You don't have any idea."  Laughter is building up in her chest, absurd in this situation and all the stronger for it.  "You don't know a thing."  The Master’s lip is curled and his eyes narrowed–he’s furious, but she can't stop.  “That must’ve been one hell of a rock you hid under, yeah?  You bury your head in Time Sand or something?  How was it you missed the entire end of the Time War?”

Vaguely, she senses a change in the room as the dull murmur of voices in the background goes quiet.  She wants to look away, check if anyone is watching this exchange but there's a shadowy ring at the edges of her vision, blocking out everything but the face of the man in front of her.

"Tell me what you know," he says through clenched teeth.

"Not a chance."

His nostrils flare.  “Perhaps you don’t understand what’s at stake,” he says, speaking slowly and deliberately.  “I have the ability to put you in unspeakable, endless agony.  And I will, until you tell me what I want to know.”

She snorts.  “Been doing that for hours already, and it hasn’t got you anywhere.  D’you really think more pain is going to do the trick?”

“I think you might be underestimating how much I'm enjoying hurting you.”

“And I think that you’re underestimating how much I’m enjoying knowing something you don’t,” she answers, head tipping back and forth between them as she tries to keep track of the subjects in the sentence.  Everything’s starting to feel slick and paper-thin, like hour three of watching glossy, vapid telly with her mum.  Too much sugar, no room for the real world, knees like elastic and head off center.

Lightning fast, his screwdriver is digging into her abdomen again, his grip biting the skin of her arm through her jacket.  "If you think the last few hours were anything,  _anything_  at all, you have no idea how creative I can be,” he snarls.  “I could make you suffer for days, weeks, months on end.  I could make your body weep, your mind break.  I could make you beg for death."

His face is right in front of hers, she can still see it, can feel his hot breath and the flecks of spittle from his shouting, but there's a roaring in her ears, growing louder by the second and threatening to drown everything else out.  "Probably," she agrees faintly.  "But you're going to have to wait a bit first."

"And why's that?"

"'Cause," she says as the darkness starts to close in, "pretty sure I'm gonna pass out."

The last thing she sees is the Master scrambling to catch her.

***

The Doctor had always been fond of the idea that the most important rule of TARDIS travel was ‘don’t wander off.’  In fact, his previous regeneration was so hung up on this notion that for a while he’d made a habit of mentioning it every time they’d open the ship’s doors.  _Welcome to Planet So-and-So, Rose, home of the Really-Impressive-Something-or-Other.  See the sights, enjoy the food, and remember, don’t wander off._   And she’d smile, pat his arm, and then proceed to do whatever she liked.  Honestly, who did he think he was kidding? 

She knew the first rule of TARDIS travel perfectly well, and that definitely wasn’t it.

Even before he’d even taken her on her first real trip, before she’d run headlong onto his ship and away from her old life, she’d understood.  Because down in that boiling, fetid London underground, she’d said  _Tip in your anti-plastic, and let’s go_ , and he’d answered  _I’m not here to kill it.  I’ve got to give it a chance._ And he had–despite the risk and the fear and everything else, he had pleaded with his adversary to stop, begged that stubborn, horrible vat of plastic to choose peace. 

There’d been other bits of Doctorish ideology added on as they traveled together, each one just as high and noble.  Look for the best in everyone.  Look for answers everywhere.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions.  Don’t be afraid to take a stand.  Life, in all its infinite forms, is precious.  Love, for all its infinite varieties, is universal.  The Doctor would give his inevitable speeches, and her heart would swell with pride and the strength of his words and that fierce, passionate zealotry of the young, fighting for a cause.    

And sure, sometimes it’d been harder to stay true to those ideals, maybe.  It’s definitely hard now that she’s on her own–but no matter.   She believed in them then, and she believes in them still.

(Very nearly always.)

***

She wakes up lying on her back staring at the ceiling.

There's a warm haze over everything, and Rose smacks her lips groggily.  She tries and fails to lift a hand to rub her eyes–another tug reveals that her wrist is trapped, which gives her enough of an adrenalin spike to come the rest of the way awake.

"What the..."  She strains to sit up enough to see her surroundings.  She's back in her cell, lying on the bed, and there's an IV in the crook of her elbow.  There’s also a series of straps holding down her arms.

"Don't struggle," says an unfamiliar voice.  At the side of the bed, a woman in a white lab coat appears, eyes never straying from her clipboard.  "There's no point–your arms are restrained.  And you should rest.  You’ve been unconscious for nearly half an hour."

Rose flops back onto the bed.  "Who are you?"

The woman makes a few notations on the chart before answering.  "Ship’s medic,” she says with a click of her pen, which she tucks into her coat pocket.  "You are recovering well.  What is your current pain level?"

"You're keeping me tied to the bed now?"

"No.”  Setting the clipboard down on the bedside table, the woman takes out a penlight and begins flashing it in Rose’s eyes.  “That was just to ensure you didn't accidentally rip out the IV when you woke up.  Additionally, some patients have been recorded having muscle spasms and occasionally seizures after interrogatory sessions.

“Pupil dilation normal,” she comments to herself.  “No sign of subconjunctival hemorrhage.  Speech presents as normal.”  Raising her voice, she asks, “What is your current pain level?”

“I’m fine,” says Rose, exasperated, and opens her mouth to demand to be untied when she remembers that she never reset her chip–the pain filter is still active.  Cautiously, she readjusts it and groans as the aches all over her body suddenly flare into life.

“Alright, maybe not a hundred percent,” she admits.  Her stomach in particular is sore, sort of like if she’d gone overboard with the sit-ups, but after a quick assessment, she thinks that’s the worst of it.  “I’ll live.  You want to untie me now?”

   “IV first,” says the medic coolly.  “I’m going to finish the evaluation and give you something to prevent further muscle cramping, and then I’ll take the line out.”

As the woman gets to work, Rose stares up at the ceiling.  The last few hours start to come back, and she sifts through the memories, trying to recall if she said anything stupid while the Master was torturing her.  Toward the end, everything had gone a bit fuzzy, but thinking back, it doesn’t seem like she revealed any secrets.

There’s a rush of cold down her arm from the IV; the medic is injecting medication into the line.  Almost immediately, Rose notices the aches in her stomach fading.  With a sigh of relief, she turns her head so her cheek rests on the pillow.

As her perspective shifts, her eyes land on something odd.  A box, a black box, about the size and shape of a video player, is tucked into the nook right on top of the mini washer and dryer, and she spends a moment staring at it.  Had that always been there?

She doesn’t think so.   

There’s a slight pinch at the crook of her arm as the IV line is removed.  A bit of gauze is taped to her arm, and the shackles are unbuckled.  As the medic packs up her supplies, Rose sits up slowly, rolling a shoulder.  It’d be smart to thank this woman, ask her name, try to connect with her–that’d be the Doctor thing to do.  But the medic’s expression is blank, bordering on cold, and every time Rose tries for eye contact, she turns her head away.  The thought of trying to break through that wall seems so exhausting that Rose just watches her leave without further comment. 

Instead, she turns her attention back to the strange box on top of the laundry machines.  She’s certain it wasn’t there before, but why add it to her cell?

Her legs ache a bit as she stands up, and she pauses for a moment to stretch before limping over to investigate.  The box has no outer markings at all–no pinhole camera lenses or microphones–and though surveillance seems like the most likely reason for its appearance, she’s not sure what it could possibly be monitoring. 

Reaching up, she tries to move it, but it’s bolted down.  Rose runs her finger over the top of it–no dust.

Hmm.

Absently, she pulls off the IV bandage and rolls her sleeve back down over her arm as she hobbles toward the cell door.  Just outside, Jeremy is on duty, eyes forward, chin held up, and both hands on his weapon. 

“Hey.”  She gives him a smile as she taps against the clear plastic of the door.  “Good to see you again.”

He gives her the barest hint of a nod and the beginning of a smile before he snaps back to attention, like he’s scared to break protocol.

Rose isn’t discouraged, though–he’ll come around if she keeps talking.  “Um, d’you know if anyone come in here while I was gone?  Or maybe while I was unconscious?  Maybe brought some equipment with them?”

Keeping his eyes straight ahead, Jeremy answers stiffly, “I can’t answer that.”  Then, after a glance at her face out of the corner of his eye, he relents.  “No, really, I can’t–I just came on shift about twenty minutes ago.  They had us downstairs doing extra drills.”

“Ah, ok.”  She shrugs, idly biting her thumbnail.  “Just wondering.  There’s a new little box in here, is all.  A black box?”  When his expression remains blank, she lets it go.  “So, new training regimen?  They working you hard?”

“It’s a bloody pain,” he mutters, slumping down a bit, and Rose hides a smile.  Nothing like griping about work to bring somebody out of their shell. 

“Let me guess,” she says, “your boss has read about some big article on new security techniques.  Wants to give them a go?”

“Nah,” he says, relaxing his hold on his weapon enough to tug at the collar of his uniform.  “It’s the new rules in place ever since you got on board.  Extra hours, crack of dawn training sessions, and the lectures!  You never heard the like!  You’d think we were letting intruders in left and right, the way the Chief of Security goes on.  Man has a bug up his arse.  Sorry,” he adds, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye again.

“S’alright,” laughs Rose, “Anyway, I’m the one who should be sorry.  It’s my fault you’ve got all that extra work.  If I hadn’t come on board, you’d probably be able to read the paper on duty, maybe enjoy a nice cuppa.” 

“Ah, c’mon then, it wasn’t that lax,” he says in the same tone, returning the joke.  “Anyway, we caught you fast enough, didn’t we?” 

He leans in closer, shoulder pressing against the clear plastic of the door as he talks softly through the porthole.  “Really though, how did you get on board?” he asks with a grin.  “C’mon, you’ve gotta tell me.  It’s driving the Chief mad, wondering.”

And here’s the thing–there’d been all those lessons the Doctor had taught her, those great and noble ideals full of mercy, faith, and hope, every one of them set like a compass rose in her heart.  But for all that, there’d been other things, too.  Things he’d never meant to teach her, lessons he’d never meant for her to learn.  Lies go down easier if they’ve got a bit of truth attached to them.  Guilt is a powerful motivator, as is fear.  There is always a weak point in your enemy’s plan–find it.  Exploit it.  There is a level of force against which nothing can stand.  Everything has its time, and everything dies.

And most of all, never tell your secrets.

Rose smiles into Jeremy’s curious eyes.  "Oh, just wandered in, really."

***

Some twenty minutes later, the Master visits her.

Even before he reaches her cell row, they can hear him coming, his voice echoing down the corridor as he gives orders to some poor underling.  Jeremy sucks in one panicked breath at the sound and steps away from the door, tugging at his cuffs and straightening his jacket as he resumes his post.  Understanding, Rose backs away and leans up against the rear wall.  She’s waiting there, facing the cell door, when the Master arrives.

Without a word, the Master gives an imperious nod to the door, and Jeremy starts to fumble with some sort of electric key device.  Annoyed, the Master sweeps him aside, unlocks it with his screwdriver, and comes in with hardly a pause. 

Trying not to think about the remnants of the pain in her stomach muscles, Rose forces herself to stand up tall, to look him in the eye as he walks through her cell door.  “So.”  She takes a deep breath and lets it go.  “More questions?”

The Master is silent for a moment, standing in the middle of the cell observing her, drumming his fingers lightly against his folded arms.  “Actually,” he begins slowly and with a sort of preternatural calm, “I thought I’d give you a chance to reconsider.  Why waste each other’s time if we don’t need to?  Surely cooperation is starting to look like the more attractive option by now, don’t you–”

There’s a pause as he glances around, frowning.  When he speaks again, he sounds more like himself.  “This…doesn’t look like a prison cell.”

Rose shrugs.  “Don’t look at me.  It’s your jail.”

Moving to the bed, he takes a handful of the duvet, squeezes it, and lets out an exasperated sigh.  “Oh, come on, how hard is it to understand the instruction ‘convert to prison’?  Did they need a checklist?  A diagram?  Shocking how difficult it is to get good help these days.”  Raising an eyebrow, he asks in a voice loud enough to carry out into the hall, “Well, are you enjoying your stay?  Everything to your satisfaction?  Can I get you more complimentary mints, perhaps?” 

“Could’ve done with a fruit basket,” Rose observes lightly.

He snorts as he taps his fingers over the headboard of the bed.  “I’ll get right on that.” 

“Ta.”

Clicking his tongue in beats of four, the Master resumes that eerily calm demeanor.  “Of course, if you’d stop all this unnecessary arguing and just answer my very simple and reasonable questions, everybody would win.  Fruit baskets all around!”

“Ri-ight,” says Rose, watching him.  “I’ll just trade away information for fruit, will I?  Yeah, makes sense.”

“Metaphorical fruit,” he says, eyes raised to the ceiling as if seeking patience.  He spreads his arms.  “The gleaming red apples of trust.  The beautiful golden bananas of cooperation.  The wonderful pineapples of…something.  All coming together–”  He clasps his hands and smiles insipidly.  “–in the glorious fruit salad of friendship.” 

After a moment of awwing over his own words, he starts moving slowly around the room, tapping his fingernails in that same pattern on the top of the dresser as he passes, the sound louder and more insistent than before.   _Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap._

Rose eyes him with distrust.  “What d’you keep doing that for?”

“Hmm?”

“The tapping.”  She frowns.  “Thought it was a habit before, but now it’s like you’re doing it on purpose.”

The noise stops as though a switch had been thrown.  The Master looks almost embarrassed.

“What?” she presses.

“Bugger,” he mutters and then points and activates his laser screwdriver at the black box above the laundry.  Then, tucking it away, he drops his eyes to the floor and begins to surreptitiously tap that same pattern out with just one finger, oh-so-softly against the pocket of his suit jacket.   _Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap._

Rose observes this, waits a beat.  “Are you trying to hypnotize me?”

His mouth tightens at the corners.  “Yes.”

“Ah.”  She nods, takes a seat on the edge of the bed.  “Not working very well, is it?”

“Not so much, no.”

“Maybe I’m just not the hypnotizing type.”

He grumbles as he slumps back against the wall in the same spot she’d recently occupied.  “It’s nothing to do with you.  At least I don’t think so,” he adds in an aside.  “Most likely, it’s the TARDIS.  The shield over your mind is extensive.  Much broader than I’d thought.”

“And the box?”

“Hmm?”  He glances at her, follows the jerk of her head to the strange piece of equipment above the laundry.  “Oh, that.  Signal booster.  Had to be especially strong to overcome any lingering resentment.”

“Ah.”

“Ah.”  He looks glum for a moment, the absolute picture of a little boy denied a treat.  Then, in a sudden shift, he hops up, dusts off his hands.  “Well, that’s a lost cause.  For now.”  His eyes glitter a little as he stares at her.  “How about we go for a walk?”

Ten minutes later, and they’re standing next to each other in front of a picture window on an observation deck.  Outside, a panoply of green mountains crawl past beneath them. 

The Master seems completely relaxed, hands resting in his pockets as he gazes out the window.  “Everything looks so tiny from up here,” he comments, like they’re two tourists out sightseeing or something.  “Little trees, little houses, little people.” 

Not knowing what to say, Rose hums in acknowledgement.  The contrast in his mood from earlier in the day is unsettling, which she assumes is at least part of the point–keeping her off balance, uncertain, making her easier to manipulate.  It’s working, because here she is, unrestrained and with only two guards, one of them Jeremy, and she can’t quite make up her mind about giving escape a try.  With some effort, she stops herself from biting a fingernail.

“You know,” says the Master casually, apparently free from internal conflict, “I used to be something of a dab hand with a shrink ray.”

Rose glances at him.  “Really?”

“The Tissue Compression Eliminator.”  He sighs fondly.  “Once, I made a little tiny dinosaur with it.”

“Yeah?”  She turns to look at him properly.  “You could really shrink living things without it killing them?”

“What?  No.”  He wrinkles his nose.  “Of course not.  Killing them was the whole point.”

Rose shakes her head.  “But, if you’re just trying to kill them, why bother with the shrinking?”

He looks at her as though she’s dribbled on her shirt, and despite everything, it nearly makes her heart ache.  “To drive him mad, of course.” 

“Oh,” she says, not needing to ask whom he’s talking about.  “Yeah, s’pose that would do it.”

They are silent a long moment. 

“So,” she asks, “why’d you stop?”

 “There were reasons.  Lots of them.”  He clears his throat.  “Important ones.”

“You shrunk yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Rose snickers.

“Oh, just the once!” he objects, but then he laughs, too.

It’s nice.

Very nice.

And so, so dangerous.

The jolt of that thought pulls her back, makes her focus, because she knows,  _she knows_ he’s absolutely doing it on purpose.  It’s the siren’s call of Stockholm Syndrome mixed with that painful familiarity and a dash of shared grief.  Whatever else he is, he’s lost, and she’s lost, too, even more than he knows.  The temptation to reach out, to connect, to  _fix_  is strong.  And he’s counting on that.    

It’s alright, though–this is a game she knows how to play, maybe even better than him.  She inclines her head, speaks in a gentle voice. “Did you know him for a long time?  Before the war, I mean.”

He swallows audibly and opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out.

When he doesn’t speak, she nods.  “S’alright.  He never liked to talk about it, either.”

“No, it’s–” He clears his throat.  “It’s not that.  Yes, I knew him.  Since we were children.”

“What was that like,” she wonders aloud.

“Competitive,” he answers with a bit of a smile playing on his lips.  “Thrilling.  Wild.  We were neither of us much for following rules, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that he’s not very good at keeping his mouth shut, so we were constantly in trouble.”  He chuckles nostalgically.  “We used to sneak out of the Capitol to go drinking in the Low Town, and–”

He cuts off and closes his eyes, taking his hands out of his pockets and rubbing one of them over his face.

“Did you fight with him?”

He half-laughs, eyes still closed.  “All the time.”

“No,” she clarifies.  “I mean, I figured you must’ve, with the miniature bodies and all.  But I was talking about the Time War.”

Silent, he shakes his head and then, looking away, mutters, “Not with him.”

“Did you fight in it at all?”  Then she ducks her head.  “Sorry, I don’t mean it like that sounded.  I just don’t understand how you can still be here.”

“Yes, I fought,” he says through gritted teeth and then glares at her, eyes dark.  “Did you?”

“Yeah.”  She puts her hands on her hips, returns his stare.  “And no.  Not the way you were thinking, anyway.”

His eyes narrow, and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to pull at that bit of enigmatic information, but he shakes his head instead.  “Then you don’t understand.  You–” He pauses, and at his sides, his hands curl into fists.  “You can’t.  You can’t know what it was like at the end of the war.  No one could without seeing it.  Death, destruction, on a scale never before seen anywhere, across all the dimensions.  The Time Lords may be–may have been masters of time’s mysteries, but the Daleks were beyond number, and as they spread, they…  There were pockets of time shredding, dissolving, inverting.  Becoming toxic beyond all hope of repair–breeding grounds for horrors that defied imagination.  And the gaping maws of the abominations that those belching cauldrons birthed….”

He shudders, staring off with sightless eyes. 

Despite herself, Rose feels a pang of sympathy, remembering another face with that same expression.  “So what’d you do?”

In a whisper, he answers.  “I ran.”

She shakes her head slowly.  “But…how?  Where did you go?  The Doctor would’ve known.  He’d have found you.”

There is a pause, during which he seems to shake off the weight of memory.  He continues, more composed, “There are ways to disguise yourself right down to the basic biological level, and that’s what I did.  Hid myself, my essence, in a protected vessel, with nothing but a witless human in control of my body.  I very nearly died like that.  It was only by the luck of a chance encounter that I was set free.”

“A chance encounter with who?” Rose asks, but he doesn’t answer.  Dropping his eyes to the floor, he swallows, and when he looks up at her, there’s a hint of tears swimming right at the edge of his lashes.

“Please.”  He clears his throat.  “Please tell me what happened.  About Gallifrey and the…the War, I mean.  I’m all that’s left, and I just–”  With a sniff, he closes his eyes for a  moment and then looks at her again, pleading.  “Please.”

His face is so well suited for this sort of thing, boyish,  _innocent_  even.  His hand reaches for hers.  She lets him take it.  The performance is flawless, enough so that she kind of wants to give him a hug, maybe bring him a cuppa.  It’s difficult, actually difficult to break character. 

Rose takes a deep breath, lets it go.  “Wow.  You really brought out the big guns there,” she observes lightly.  “Crying and everything.  Did you really think I’d be that easy?”

His eyes are still shining with those unshed tears, and his voice cracks.  “You would really deny me–”

“Your problem,” she interrupts, “is you’re doing it all wrong.  You can’t start with torture and work back from there to sob stories and pity.  If you’d started with the water works, I’d’ve probably told you right off the bat.  Bullet dodged there, eh?”  She pats their joined hands with her free one.

All that excess of emotion slips right off his face, and his grip tightens.  “Is that what you think?”

“Well, from where I sit, we’re at a bit of an impasse,” she says, summoning up her courage.  “‘Cause you want to know what I know, but I don’t really feel like telling, since that information is keeping me alive.  You can’t take it from me by force, and hypnotism is right out.  Killing me isn’t a great option either, is it, since I am literally the only person who knows.  So there we are.”

A shiver runs down her spine as his lip curls. It’s terrifying to watch the change in his face.  Everything that was soft and open has turned hard; no hint of tears remain, and his fingernails dig into her hand.  “Your problem is assuming that’s all that’s happening here.  You say _impasse_ , but that’s not exactly true, not in the long run.  The TARDIS won’t have the power to protect you forever–sooner or later, that shield will fall.  I’ve no idea when, but that’s part of what makes it exciting.”  His grin looks a bit mad as he nudges her with his elbow.  “But just for a little extra fun, I thought I’d add a countdown with more definition.  You see out there?”

He lifts her hand in his as he points to the horizon, where the green of mountain forest is starting to give way to the grey of urban concrete.  “We are currently flying above the island nation of Japan, population one hundred and twenty-eight million.  That up ahead is the outskirts of Tokyo.  We’ll be over it in about an hour.”  He pauses, savoring the moment.  “Do you know, I’ve always fancied the thought of burning an entire country.” 

Rose feels the blood drain from her face, her jaw go slack.  When the Master sees her expression, he shakes his head.  “Oh, no, I don’t mean to do it today.  I mean, I could.”  His gaze becomes distant for a moment as he calculates.  “Yes, I could, but I’d much rather do it right.   I’m thinking big, actually–something really dramatic.  Canon-like, mounted out there, right on the prow of the Valiant,” he adds, pointing again with their joined hands. 

“You see, there’s this new formula I’ve been working on in my spare time.  A lovely little chemical weapon, a bit primitive, maybe, but very, very incendiary.”  His face splits into a grin, eyes dancing.  “I call it Dragon Fire.”

The words come out of her mouth all on their own.  “You can’t.”

He snorts.  “Of course I can.  And I will.  Unless of course, you manage to distract me with something more interesting.”  He lets go of her hand, lifts his own up to her face, fingertips playfully dancing just a few centimeters from her temple.  Her breath catches in her throat as he closes the distance to her skin, but there’s no attempt at telepathy–his fingers just twine in her hair, tuck a lock of it behind her ear.

Once he’s done with that, he strokes his knuckles across her cheek, right up to the corner of her mouth.  He leans in, speaking low.  “It should take me approximately eight days to build that canon, given that we’ll need to pick up a few parts and pieces.  Eight days.  That’s your ticking clock.”

 There should be a speech here, she knows it, has heard it a thousand times, but the words are slipping from her mind.   All she can manage is the bit at the end.  “I’ll…I’ll stop you.”

His lips quirk up as he tilts his head.  “Aww, bless.”  With one quick finger, he boops her on the nose and then, turning away, snaps his fingers at the guards.  “I’m done here.  Take the lady back to her luxury suite.”

***

The walk back to her cell seems to take forever. Rose keeps her head down, can’t even summon the will to use this chance to check out the layout of the ship. 

Why the hell hadn’t she seen that coming?   And, more importantly, what is she going to do now? 

In the back of her mind, there’s a voice, tiny at first but growing louder, saying that it doesn’t matter.  That none of this is real, just a false parallel, and when she finally fixes whatever horrible mistake spawned it, everything will realign with the proper universe.  None of this will have happened.  But if she’s killed, if her mission is compromised, everyone everywhere could suffer.  Every universe could be destroyed.

She knows what Torchwood would say. 

She knows what the Doctor would say, too, or at least, she thinks she does.   There’s always the possibility that the answer might change regeneration to regeneration.  Or depending on the time of day.  Or whether he’s had lunch.  Or how many Daleks there are in the general vicinity.

At last, she is escorted back into her cell.  As the door shuts behind her, she collapses against the wall, head back, eyes closed.

As soon as the other guard leaves, Jeremy does a quick check of the hallway and then turns to her door with stricken eyes.  “We’ve got to do something.” 

“Yeah,” she agrees.

“I knew he was evil, but I had no idea that he’d…  We have to, we can’t let him…”  He swallows, looking ill.  “All those people.”

She nods dully. 

“Can’t you just–” He breaks off, shaking his head.  “I mean, is it so important not to–”

She cuts him off, her voice low and harsh.  “I can’t tell him.” 

Their eyes stay locked in a battle of wills, but Rose stands firm, and Jeremy is the first to look away. 

“Then it’s hopeless,” he says quietly.

“No,” she whispers.  And then louder, firmer, “No.”  She stands up, straightens her shoulders and presses a hand against the cell door.  “We’ll find another way to stop him.”

Jeremy looks terrified.  “How could we do that?  They say he’s immortal.  That he’s a god.”

“Not a god,” Rose corrects.  “A Time Lord.  Powerful, sure, but not immortal.  Not invulnerable.”

“Well, then,” he says, in nothing more than a hushed whisper, “how do you kill a Time Lord?”

Rose looks him right in the eye.   _I’m not here to kill it_ , the memory echoes in her head.  But that was a very long time ago, and this is now, and the choice and the burden fall to her alone.

“Please,” Jeremy whispers, pleading.  “Help us.”

Decision made, Rose leans in closer to the door’s porthole.  As softly as she can manage, she breathes, “Can you smuggle in any aspirin?”

 


	5. A Creature of Bone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Some mentions of domestic abuse.

The logistics are a problem.

Rose has never tried to assassinate anyone before—she and the Doctor had typically been on the thwarting side of things, and she’d always assumed theirs was the harder job.  Now she’s not so sure.  All those alien plots, ancient coups, and surprise invasions—had the bad guys all had to deal with this many fidgety details in order to set their plans in motion?

No wonder they’d always been so annoyed when she and the Doctor showed up and spoiled everything.

Jeremy, through no small risk, has managed to reach a contact in London who can supply the aspirin.  The sticking point is that there’s no way to get it onboard the Valiant—every post, supply delivery, or personnel transfer goes through a scanner.  Though they don’t know exactly what it’s searching for, easily obtained, Time Lord-specific toxins are likely to be high on the list.  The only thing that’s not scanned, as far as they can tell, is the Master’s own private shuttle.  But though there’s a stop in London scheduled in two days, the odds of getting the Master to unwittingly mule his own poison seem depressingly low.

Rose spends a night wrestling with the problem of how to disable one of the scanners without alerting anyone, and wakes up with her hand still curled around the ghost of a sonic screwdriver and a headache that lasts the rest of the morning.  

“You know,” Jeremy whispers through the door as she moodily tears off bits of her dry toast and scatters crumbs all over her breakfast tray, “maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way.  Maybe what we need is another person.”

Rose cocks her head, leans in closer.  “What’d you mean?”

“It’s just…have you seen his wife?”

She pauses with a bite halfway to her mouth.  “Lucy.”

Jeremey nods. 

“You really think she’d help us?” she asks, not bothering to hide her skepticism.  “I s’pose she’d be in the best position to do it, but is that realistic?  She’s a little…and they seemed like they were…”

“She has bruises.”

Rose puts down her toast.  “Yeah?”

He nods, his eyes sober.  “Used to be, you’d only catch of glimpse of them now and then from under the edge of her clothes.  Now, it’s like he doesn’t care if they show.  She’s gotten good at keeping out of his way, and he’s been distracted with you this last week, but this morning, I saw marks in the shape of fingers on her arm and a bruise under her eye.”

Rose’s stomach twists uncomfortably, with either pity or worry, though she’s not sure which.  Something about Lucy makes her uneasy, but from a practical standpoint, she’s a perfect solution to their problem—she nearly always accompanies the Master when he makes trips to the ground, and she’s not going to be stopped or questioned by any of the guards. 

Rose asks herself what the Doctor would do and ends up thinking about Mrs. Connolly on Florizel Street and the haunted, hunted look in her terrified eyes.  How tightly her hands had gripped Rose’s as she’d cried, flinching every time her husband raised his voice.

“Alright,” she says softly.  “I’ll check it out.”

***

She gets the opportunity later that afternoon.

The Master is in his workshop assembling his death cannon, and Lucy is keeping him company. 

Rose is there, too—overseeing the construction, or so the Master tells her with a smirk.  She assumes that the idea behind making her watch him build the weapon is to fill her guilt or mental anguish or something, but really, it’s the sort of torment that would be a lot more effective against the Doctor.  At least he’d know what all the hardware currently lying on the floor in a heap will eventually do—from her perspective, it’s just a pile of junk.  Rose is more bothered by the Master’s unholy taste in TV.

(They are currently on their third hour of Teletubbies.)

 “ _Again, again!”_ shrieks an eager, piping voice as the colorful characters hop around awkwardly on a field of green grass. 

Rose bangs her head against the metal grating behind her with a resounding _clang_ , but there’s nothing to be done—she’s handcuffed in place, and the show is being projected onto the opposite wall, practically larger than life. 

“Can’t we watch something else?  Just for a little while at least?  C’mon,” she wheedles, twisting around to look at Lucy seated nearby on a chair that looks a hell of a lot more comfortable than the floor that Rose is currently stuck on.  “Lucy, you agree with me, yeah?”

“They have soft eyes,” says Lucy dreamily, her eyes still trained on the TV.  “And such puffy heads.”

The Master glances up from some bit of machinery he’s soldering together.  “Televisions.  In their stomachs.”  He puts a spare part in his mouth and speaks around it as he turns back to his work.  “It’s utter genius.” 

“It’s for _infants_ ,” Rose stresses.  “Babies.”

“I know.”  He spits the part out and starts fastening it to the circuitry he’s building.  “I’d thought about sending them some scripts, working in a little indoctrination, but really, why gild the lily?”

The baby-faced sun starts cooing, and Rose lets out a strangled groan.

“Tell me who you are, and you can change the channel,” the Master offers lightly.

A few more bars of cheerful plinkety-plinking piano music, and Rose lets out a dramatic sigh.  “Alright, you win.  What does it matter, anyway?  My name’s Claudette.”  She holds out a hand for the remote and wiggles her fingers expectantly. 

The Master raises an eyebrow at her.  “No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.  How would you know?”

He shakes his head.  “You don’t look like a Claudette.”

“Fine, you’re right.”  She slumps back against the grating.  “It’s not Claudette.”

He watches her out of the corner of his eye, waiting. 

Rose shrugs her shoulders in defeat.  “It’s Harriet.”

The Master snorts and goes back to his work.

“Daisy?”

Silence—now he’s just ignoring her.  From her vantage point, Lucy tips her head to the side, and Rose gets a good look at the purple mark under her eye.  Lucy studies her in return.  “I think you look like an…Eloise.”

Rose widens her eyes.  “How in the world did you ever guess?”

The faintest hint of a smile shows at the corners of Lucy’s mouth, and the Master glares at them both.  Letting his soldering gun clatter to the floor, he grabs the remote, turns the volume up a couple more notches, and then stalks off around the corner of the workshop.

Lucy watches him go, and Rose can practically see her debate with herself.  Follow him or no?

Whatever the calculation, she decides to stay and, after a few minutes, even hops up to turn the TV down a few clicks.

“Better,” says Rose with feeling.  “Thanks.”

Lucy doesn’t answer at first, seeming shocked at her own daring.  Twisting the fabric of her dress between her fingers, she watches the corner where the Master disappeared, and Rose watches her. 

She’s not going to get a better chance than this.

“Lucy.”  Rose takes her time, waits until she sees the other woman’s head turn toward her just a fraction.   “Do you want to be here?  _Here_ here, I mean,” she stresses.  “On this ship, with him.  If you had the choice?”

Lucy’s voice is hardly more than a whisper, but her answer is quick, automatic.  “Yes.”

“You sure about that?” Rose presses.

“Yes,” she answers, stronger now.  “Yes.  I want to be with Harry.  He needs me.  I…I help him.”  She turns to look Rose in the eye.  “He said you’d ask me that.  You won’t be able to stop him, you know.  It’ll be easier if you give in.”

“No,” says Rose, her reply just as automatic as Lucy’s.  After a moment, she adds, “Is that what you did?  Give in?”

Lucy ignores her question.  “Is it true,” she asks, “that you traveled with another Time Lord?  The Doctor?”

Rose nods. 

Lucy’s face is pensive.  “Harry talks about him sometimes.  Was he, was he also…?”

“No, he wasn’t,” says Rose, not sure what Lucy was trying to say but pretty damn certain that whatever her experiences were with the Master, they were nothing like traveling with the Doctor.  “He was good.  Kind.”  She’s working to keep the judgment out of her voice, but she can’t help but add, “We helped people.”

There’s a quiet moment, during which Lucy sits very still, and Rose realizes that her companion is checking for the sound of footsteps.  But beyond the cooing of Teletubbies there is only silence.  Some of the tension in Lucy’s frame gives way, and she studies the program projected on the opposite wall. 

“When I was small,” she murmurs, “I used to play in big, green fields like that.”

“Oh?”

“In Sussex, on the cliffs above the sea.”  Another ghost of a smile flickers at the corners of Lucy’s mouth.  Rose keeps her own mouth shut and lets the moment stretch on.

“I always thought that there was a reason for everything, why we were there, why the grass was green and the sea and sky were blue.  I never knew what it was, but still I believed.”  She turns, directs her empty stare at Rose.  “I…I was wrong.”

“And that’s why you’re helping him?”  The other woman doesn’t answer, and Rose feels her frustration mount.  “He’s killing people, Lucy.  We have to stop him.”

Lucy shrugs.  “Death isn’t new.  People die every day.”

“Not like this.  Not mass murdered, slaughtered, burned in their homes.”  Anger is seeping into her voice, and Rose takes a breath through her nose to calm down.  It doesn’t work.  “How can you even make that comparison?”

“Did you know,” Lucy says softly, “Harry traveled to the last moments of the universe before the ship broke.  He showed me, with his mind, what he’d seen.”  Her fingers flutter up to her temple, and her face creases with remembered pain.  “What it is like at the end.  When everything dies and nothing but the darkness remains.”  She drops her hands to her lap, stares down at them, hopeless.  “What’s the point of fighting it?”

Rose tries to scoot closer, the handcuffs biting into her wrists.  “No.  It doesn’t have to be like that.  There’s so much more out there, so much life and wonder and beauty…” 

As she tries to come up with the right words, Lucy tilts her head and studies her, some thought flickering behind those vacant blue eyes.

“Did you really travel with the Doctor?”

Rose nods. 

Lucy swallows, and when she speaks again, she sounds wistful.  “And was everything you saw really so beautiful?”

Rose can’t help it; she hesitates.  “N-no.  Not everything.  But there’s life, everywhere life, fighting for a chance to survive.  There’s love.  There’s hope, Lucy.  And that’s enough.”

Lucy shakes her head, but it doesn’t seem like a denial.  “Nothing can stop him.”

Rose reaches out, manages to rest a hand on Lucy’s arm, covering the spot where the purple marks fade to green.  “I can.”

Lucy doesn’t answer, and when the Master returns moments later, she doesn’t speak again for the rest of the afternoon.

***

That night, Rose tosses and turns in her bed.  There’s nothing for it—they’re going to have to risk sending the aspirin through the scanners.  And if it’s detected, it’ll be obvious she’s had help, which will put Jeremy at risk, along with his contacts and anyone else they get to help them.

It chafes until she’s nearly raw with it—using other people as her tools.  It’s an unfortunate necessity, the lesser of two evils and all that, and she understands the need, but _if she could just get out there and do something_. 

She groans and flops over onto her other side, tangling up in the silky linens of her luxurious prison bed.  Eventually, nerves lose the war with exhaustion, and she falls asleep.

***

_“Brilliant, though, isn’t it?” The Doctor stood with his face pressed against the only porthole in their tiny bunk, craning his head to catch a glimpse of the swirling morass above them._

_“What, the black hole?”  Rose tested out the thin cot mattress and contemplated whether she was tired enough to make a go of it.  “Or do you mean the magic planet orbiting it?”_

_“Neither.”  He spoke softly, and his voice sounded hollow as it echoed against the glass.  “Imagine how far they traveled to get here, these people.  Imagine flying down that gravity funnel, building a base, and staying here, perched on a tiny clump of rock.  Drilling and drilling and drilling, not knowing what you might find.”_

_She shrugged off her jacket, rolled it up as a pillow, and settled back on the bed.  “Gotta love those intrepid humans.”_

_She’d just closed her eyes when she felt the mattress sag.  Smiling to herself, she shifted to make room in the narrow space, and he scooted to sit next to her, side by side, his hip against her shoulder and his back leaning against the wall.  Eyes still closed, Rose raised the hand closest to him and wiggled her fingers; he took it and stroked his thumb over her knuckles._

_“It’s not that, exactly,” he murmured.  “I mean, it’s impressive, yes, but there’s plenty of intrepidness to be found out there in the universe—otherwise, nobody would ever go anywhere.  It’s the resilience.”_

_He let his grip loosen and began tracing the outline of each of her fingers.  “Just think of it—them balancing here on the edge of nothing.  They’ve lost their leader, lost crew, lost a bloody big chunk of their base this morning, and yet here they are, carrying on and listening to Bolero.  Amazing.”_

_“Mmm, resilience.”  She blinked one eye open at him, sleepy.  “Good to know.  Your favorite human…thing.”_

_He was smiling down at her, a special, just-for-her smile.  “Oh, well, you know,”—he gently brushed a lock of hair away from her face—“One of them, anyway.”_

_His fingers linger on her cheek, her neck, her shoulder._   His hand is warmer than she expects and more hesitant.

“Hey.  Wake up.”

She blinks awake in the dim light, someone’s hand shaking her shoulder.  The dark figure leaning over her nearly takes a fist to the jaw—Rose sees a glint of long, blonde hair and stops herself just in time.

“Fuck.  Lucy.”  The bedsprings creak as she scrambles up into a sitting position on the bed.   Kicks some of her covers off.  “What are you doing here?”

There’s a long moment of silence, during which Rose could almost convince herself that she’d been dreaming except that she can hear the other woman’s breathing.  Finally, in a soft voice, Lucy murmurs, “I want to help.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

A quick glance at the door shows that there’s no guard—Lucy either waited a long time for a distraction, or she engineered something herself.  Or, Rose thinks with a grimace, this is all a set up. 

No way to know.

“Just tell me what to do,” says Lucy.

Rose swallows.  “Ok.”

 


End file.
